| Chapter 1: | Spatial and Environmental Justice in the Metropolis |
|
|
addition to receiving substantial attention from researchers in various academic disciplines, this issue also has influenced the formulation of public policy at the national (Clinton, 1994) and state (Bonorris, 2004) levels.
The inequitable distribution of environmental disamenities has long engaged the critical attention of researchers and social activists in the southern regions of the United States, as the South has remained one of the most polluted regions of the nation with a long history of political struggles against racial inequalities. As Robert Bullard, a pioneering environmental justice scholar and advocate, insightfully noted: “It's not an accident that the environmental justice movement was born in the South; the region that gave us the civil rights movement” (cited in Roberts, 2007, p. 6). Adam Babich, an environmental lawyer and the director of the University of Tulane's Environmental Law Clinic, explained the conjunction between civil rights and environmental justice thus: “[y]ou have communities with people who weren't able to vote until the 1960s, so they often couldn't zone out industry” (p. 6). Economically aspiring southern states, such as Florida, are to a large degree prepossessed with the politics of industrial recruitment with the result that they are often dismissive of charges of environmental racism and classicism. The socially malignant effects of this southern preoccupation are not lost on those groups and places which disproportionately bear the cost of this “developmentalist ideology” (Grosfuguel, 2000). According to Bullard (1990), southern or Sunbelt states seldom refuse industrial facilities or relocations, regardless of their social and environmental externalities. This region has enthusiastically embraced the politics of economic growth-at-all-costs and appears virtually unshakeable in its neoliberal confidence in market competition to determine the right balance between economic growth and social